


The Man From Metropolis

by Meduseld



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Case Fic, Corruption, M/M, Mentions of WW2 and all that implies, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 20,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24362836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: A private eye, a millionaire and a heatwave collide in a big city world of danger, corruption and deceit. If they can stay alive, they just might make a difference.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 32
Kudos: 69
Collections: Superbat Reverse Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All thanks to lyds' [amazing art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24590584) for the 2020 Superbat Reverse Big Bang! (Also [on tumblr](https://clarkandbruce.tumblr.com/post/620281438807457792/detective-clark-kent-is-on-the-case-drawn-for-the)). And shoutout to dippkip for being an amazing beta.

The air conditioning gave up the ghost in mid-July, in the middle of a record breaking heatwave.

That meant that by lunch, the Gotham Gazette building was a ghost ship, most having fled to cooler luncheonettes or down to the forgotten reaches of the archives, always frosty no matter the weather.

That was alright by me, I had never been one to mind the heat. And I wasn’t one of the men working the presses, making it all about a thousand times worse. It was Perry, from the Planet, where it seemed I’d left decades ago even when it hadn’t even been close to that long, that got me the tiny shoebox office down in a forgotten wing of the first floor.

Perry was a good man, sincere in being sad to see me go. And relieved, I think, that I wasn’t asking for help getting a job at the Gazette itself.

I was an optimist, but not delusional. My days in print were dead and done. But my days as a sleuth were just beginning. Even if Gotham wasn’t as easy to fly in as Metropolis. Or see in, from all the lead.

I was enjoying the quiet that settled over the building as I tried to stay busy in my office. Work was slow, mostly finding misplaced cats, so I was filling in the crossword.

It was a little too easy, mostly because it was written in the office above mine, crowd sourced via a booming voice calling for clues and answers. They’d had the same one about the river for the past three weeks. The temperature made everyone sluggish.

Lately the answers called out had been biting and unpublishable, if useful to me, given that they mentioned affairs and corruption they didn’t have the evidence to print. Lots of lurid names, some pretty well known.

I was halfway down and focused, which meant that when the door, wood warped by the humid heat, creaked open thanks to a well-placed shoulder, I didn’t look up. A bad habit.

In my head I was still expecting it to be Lois Lane, ready to rant a story into writing by yelling it at me. I missed her like a limb. Still, I should have known. Or at least been more cautious, Gotham’s never been a nice town. And I was about to learn just how rough it could get.

“Nice place” rumbled a voice I’d know anywhere; smooth and gravelly all at once. The voice of a gentleman that didn’t want to play nice. The voice of a soldier that would politely ask for your surrender, or else.

I’d never expected to hear it again, even after moving to the city of spires and smog that had birthed him. Wishful thinking I guess. Or I just knew I’d handle it badly.

“Hey-” I said and stopped short. I didn’t know what to call him. We weren’t in the army anymore, so Captain was out. Or I wanted it to be.

Bruce didn’t feel right, nor did the Batman, the nickname he’d earned through a series of daring night raids in the Ardennes, myself and five other idiots by his side. I don’t want to talk about the nickname I’d gotten. Wayne then. Even though I’d never called him that.

He hadn’t paused during my failed outburst and following confused silence, poking at my few books, pulps and classics that I never thought anybody would actually examine, and mostly desert-barren office. Art seemed inappropriate. I couldn’t even say I hadn’t had time to furnish it. I just didn’t have much to furnish it with.

All I could think, to keep from blushing at the books, was that he’d timed it right. No one would have seen him come in. Likely, no one would see him leave. He was easy to recognize after all, the city’s favorite son.

Shame though, he was quite a thing to look at. Even now, he hadn’t sacrificed the figure cutting blacks of his wardrobe. He seemed perfectly at ease, hair in place and no sweat anywhere. That was the Batman alright.

But he could bleed. I’d seen that up close. Only my eyes could tell that he was slick with sweat under that suit, that he’d lost a few pounds, gained a few scars. His left rib was bruised hard enough that could almost make out the shape of a ring on it. That was him alright. Liked to do things himself, with his own hands. I knew better than to ask how he’d got it.

“Heard you’d moved to town” he said, still staring at the bookshelf. Some he smiled at, some he frowned at. I didn’t know whether to kiss him or kill him.

Of course he knew, he made it his business to know. I didn’t need super hearing to hear the half-truth. He probably heard Lex Luthor gloating about it over brunch too, no need to be overly vigilant. Luthor loves to brag, and Bruce was smart enough to pay attention.

Even if he wasn’t, he’d have found out. Paranoia was just his nature. Between that and his rumored campaign for mayor, he wouldn’t have left any loose end unattended. Especially not one like me. I knew too much, even by less stringent standards than Bruce Wayne’s.

There was all the time we had spent together in the war, closer than close. For a moment, all I could taste was the burnt pine needle air of France under fire. I hated it as much as I loved it, if I was honest.

“Needed a change of scenery” I said instead, not even sounding convincing to myself. It’s not like I could say anything else. Like the truth. That was enough. The lie of omission in my voice got him to look at me square in the face. Good thing I was sitting down.

Over the years apart, not enough and too many, I’d convinced myself I’d exaggerated the power of his full, unimpeded gaze. It had been another lie. He was more than arresting, demanding, handsome, face still smooth and unlined even though his hair had started greying.

It made him look more dashing, more like his late father, the great specter that still loomed over this gloomy town. There were enough posters still up that I knew what he looked like. He was practically a local saint. His son was on his way there, from what I heard.

“What would you say to a job?” he said, smoothly skipping over his brief hesitation at the end. He didn’t know what to call me either. And this close, I could see a little bead of moisture at his temple. Of all the things I thought he was going to say, that wasn’t one of them.

“Depends what kind. And the check behind it” I said with a smile, enjoying the tiny, reproachful frown on his face. Maybe I hadn’t changed too much over the years, but he didn’t know it. Then he slid a small envelope across the table. Unmarked. And skinny. Maybe he knew more than I thought. I wasn’t sure I liked that.

“Two weeks ago, one of my night watchmen got stabbed. Nothing overly serious, he’s going to live. But it coincided a little too nicely with an offer on the place. A _generous_ one”, he said, starting to talk to my books again.

I nodded, trying to focus on what he was saying instead of how much I liked the sound of his voice. It helped that I didn’t have his face to distract me either.

“So you need me to find out who’s behind it?” I said, tapping the end of the envelope on my desk. There weren’t any bills in it, as far as I could tell. I was almost relieved.

“I want you to find out if Bill Kane was in on it” he said, and there was a real hurt there. He liked to take chances on people, I knew. “The other end I think I can handle” he added, a challenge I recognized in his voice. He didn’t let things slide, either.

I raised my eyebrows but let it go, finally giving in to temptation and opening it. The details were in the envelope, the night watchman being Bill, last name Kane, and the empty warehouse he guarded being in a shitty part of town. Not quite the Narrows, but close enough.

“Could just be coincidence” I said, making the Kansas heavier in my voice. Not something that would fool him, but it was an old habit. “Could be” he said, in a way that said _it isn’t_.

I bit my tongue to not ask him straight out just how much research he’d done. I knew that lead down a rabbit hole of non-answers. Instead I said “The offer came when again? It isn’t in here”, twirling the envelope between my fingers.

The other thing in there, added at the end like an afterthought, was a frankly ludicrous offer for my services. Might be easier to just put me directly on the payroll. I said it and he quirked an annoyed eyebrow, choosing to ignore it and answer my question instead.

“About three days before, Thursday. And my secretary passed it by my desk again after. Without my saying anything” he said. “So before you can ask why I came to you instead of the PIs I already have on payroll, well”. _Because they've probably been bought off_ his eyes said _._ I couldn’t see how, if he paid them what he was offering me. I almost said it, but there was no point.

In all of this I there was something else he wasn’t saying, lurking in the silent strain between his eyebrows. A pointed _do not ask_.

Even leaving that aside, it still didn’t answer another, glaring question: _why me?_ Except of course, if you knew what I did about him. He was throwing me a bone. It would be just like Bruce Wayne, to offer charity this way.

I had a sudden visceral flash to the way he’d tossed a chocolate bar like a missile at John Jones’ chest with an offhanded admonition, right after we’d had to punch through an occupied town like an angry fist. Jones always took it the worst.

“Alright” I said, and watched his heart twist and pump in his chest. Relief, like he hadn’t expected me to say yes. It was worrying, to be honest. I’d taken more than one bullet for him, and he knew it, but every time he’d been surprised. The truth is, so was I.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’d like to take a second to shout out my big noir-and-not inspirations here: [Out of the Past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Past), [Chinatown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_\(1974_film\)), [The Maltese Falcon, ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_\(1941_film\))[L.A. Confidential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Confidential_\(film\)) and [True Detective](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_\(season_2\)). Like most noir, this is set vaguely post war in the fifties ish like [DC: The New Frontier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC:_The_New_Frontier). As always, V, you're my rock.


	2. Chapter 2

You could see the heat sizzling up from the pavement, made even worse by the lack of tall buildings to shade it. My eyes, accustomed to the light, actually narrowed in the sharp rays. And the other effects of the sun.

The whole city smelled like sweat and marinated garbage, but far from homes where people tried to keep things neat and nice, it grew far, far worse. If it was bad for regular people, you can imagine what it was like for me.

The warehouse I was staring at wasn’t much, and, as promised, basically empty inside. Just a desk, unused lockers and crates, some flashlights, a spare pair of boots. It was disappointing, after braving the human crush of a street car, made so much worse by my senses.

It smelled like a pot of simmering flesh, bringing up memories I’d wanted to bury. But I’d reasoned that it wasn’t smart to fly in blind, much less on a cloudless day. Besides, there was still a long walk: the car didn’t come close to this district and nothing else did either, for that matter. Cabs would charge you an extortionary rate, if they agreed to the trip at all. Despite the fact that there were thousands of people crammed into those blocks, avoided at all costs even though it was located far before the Narrows proper, and no real transport for any of them.

That was one of Gotham’s favorite pastimes, bitching about how hard it was to get around unless you had money for a car and didn’t have it stolen, or a fancy chauffeur too, while you’re at it, and how come no mayor yet had had the balls to deliver on the promised of a train line like Metropolis and Star City had. Ignoring of course, that in Gotham there was half the industry and twice the corruption.

Listening to people talk helped keep me grounded, even when I wanted to just fly away, leave it all behind. I’d wanted to see it with ordinary eyes, the slow progression into a bad to worse neighborhood, the way the car cleared out and the surrounding heartbeats got more erratic until it stopped completely and the remaining passengers fled.

I tried to see it with Bill Kane’s eyes, a guy with good credit and no arrest record, living a modest life and giving most of his paychecks to his sisters and the kids they were raising practically on their own. Just the kind of guy Bruce Wayne liked to take a chance on.

He probably took the same route every night, part of the scenery by now, looking at the streets I was seeing in the dim light of sunset. They probably looked nicer that way, but I wouldn’t know. To me it was more like a change of set dressing, the dark doing nothing to damper my perception.

Maybe I wouldn’t care if there weren’t so many poets and artists dedicated to the beauty of the dying sun. Or maybe I just liked the light too much.

I did wish I had a cigarette. Or more like, I wished I smoked at all. It would help me blend in. But the one time I had tried the stink had been too much for my senses. That is to say, I bent over with a hacking cough like a kid, the guys in my unit laughing good naturedly. At least I’d learned to tolerate the second-hand smoke because of them. Made city living more bearable.

When I got to the area proper, sidewalks covered in the same cigarette butts and detritus as everywhere else, I found my way quickly. The warehouse was pretty easy to spot, a leviathan of a building amongst ramshackle and vandalized properties around it.

To me it just looked like a place. But I bet Bill Kane was proud of that, of how good she looked compared to her neighbors. It was an easy race, though. It was close enough to the Narrows to smell like it, drugs and smoke and desperation. Anybody living and working here wanted to be somewhere else, I’d bet. Except maybe Bill Kane.

Standing in front of the building like I was a tourist, I tracked the inside of it. You could practically see his footprints, the inside clean and safe but not neglected. He was a man who cared about his job, certainly, but that didn’t mean he might say no to extra cash and a wound he’d get better from.

I heard him before I saw him, even though his steps were whisper soft, a combination of practice and being tremendously underweight. “Hey Mister!” the kid said, smiling in a way that was strategically calculated to hide just how hungry he was, beaming up at me from under a messy mop of jet black hair, “you here about the mayder?”

It took me a second to realize he meant murder. I still wasn’t used to Gotham accents. It hurt more than it should, but then I was looking at a kid that made me think of another, younger one. Without counting the thousands of faces that blurred together into one after the war was over.

“That depends. What do you know?” I asked, trying to sound like a reporter again. I don’t think I’d ever stopped. The kid grinned, genuine now. “All about it. You got a quarter?” I pulled one out, rolling it over my knuckles.

It was harder than it looked. By the time I was eight, I could lift a cow over my head, even with the squirming. Mastering the trick with the coin had taken all of Hal Jordan’s focus and most inventive barbs as we trekked through Occupied Europe. It wasn’t the only thing he’d taught me.

“Over there, right?” I said pointed, off by about five feet on purpose. I could smell it now, the blood and death caked into the pavement. Baked in by the sun but still fresh, the coppery scent of it strong enough even regular people could smell it if they stood over it. Probably happened last night.

“You’ve been lied to Mister, but that’s okay” the kid said, so at ease there didn’t seem to be any sweat on him: “you’ve got me now”.

What he knew, or said he knew, but his heart stayed steady enough for me not to doubt him, was this: last night, a body had been dumped, some said by two men, some by three, but he thought two was likelier. If you had three men to move a body, you were in the mob and you’d be dumping the body where it wouldn’t be found. There wasn’t much I couldn’t find but the point stood.

It had been bad, half of the man’s face gone, the other cooked under the sun until the cops came, not because it had taken that long for them to be informed but because they wouldn’t risk it in the dark. It might not look very dangerous now, but by nightfall a more than a few these places would be running gin or girls or craps. Only a little nicer than dens than you could find in the Narrows. If nowhere near as profitable.

Whoever he was, his murder didn’t happen around here, and there was no noise to indicate he was a debtor or a snitch being made into an example. Just a guy. He, this was the boy, didn’t think it was anything but an ordinary mess up, maybe the aftermath of a crime of passion. He said it like he wasn’t quite sure was that was, but that it was the sort of thing you said.

“Hmm” I said, rolling the quarter before flipping it, using my thumb to launch it into his palm. Another Hal Jordan trick. Sometimes I missed those boys so much my chest ached. The kid caught it, then looked expectantly back at me. Clever, and likeable. If I didn’t think he’d bite me for suggesting it, I would look into a place for him. Like I had for another dark haired boy, tucked away on the farm I’d grown up on.

“You think it had something to do with a stabbing? Heard there was one” I said, trying to sound conspiratorial instead of accusing. The kid’s eyes still narrowed. His heartbeat slowed then picked up, like he’d decided I wasn’t a cop or a truancy officer after all.

“Nah, mister. That was real professional like. Not like this, no way no how”. I hummed, looking up like I was thinking. “And the watchman? He in on it?” I said, vaguely, like it had only just now come to mind.

Midnight black hair shook hard. “He was nice, y’know? Not like the other head crackers on the block….And kinda slow. I don’t think so. He seemed real surprised when they picked him up”. “Who did? Cops?” The kid smiled, wide, indulgent. “Nah. A real pretty looking dame in a nice car. Like they was waiting to get him to the hospital. Her and the guy driving. A warning’s one thing, a homicide charge, that’s another”.

Some of his teeth were missing, but a quick glance let me know it was from growing, not something more sinister. Or at least more sinister than the fact that he hadn’t stumbled over the word homicide.

“I’m guessing there aren’t loads of those around here” I said, hardening my tone, just a little. He rolled his eyes. “No, _sir._ They drive through plenty, to the clubs on either side here. But it ain’t like Mr. Cobblepot himself has a place on the corner”.

The name was vaguely familiar. One of the guys all of Gotham had heard about, probably. There were more of those in Gotham than anywhere else I’d been. I had a feeling this one was a contender, or maybe just the biggest name in the neighborhood.

“All right” I said, thumbing another coin at him. He caught it easily, even though he startled when I launched it out of my pocket. Maybe it wasn’t as smooth as Hal Jordan would have done it, but it did the job.

The kid ran off, but looked over his shoulder at me. I wondered just what is was he was checking for. For a minute, it took all I had to stay rooted to the spot and not reach out and grab him, take him home. But that wouldn’t solve anything. No matter who those big blue eyes reminded me of.

I stayed for a minute, smelling the scents baking into the ground around me, the sad sweat of poverty and fear and pain, mixed together by melting asphalt. Then I left, by my own power this time. I couldn’t stand another round with a street car in the heat.

The day already smelled ripe and it wasn’t even noon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey that’s [Jason Todd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Todd) and a reference to [the Penguin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Cobblepot_\(Gotham\)).


	3. Chapter 3

St. Swithin’s was full to bursting, buzzing like a hive even to normal ears. I hate hospitals.

Most folks do, I reckon, but I’m not like regular people. So on top of the stress and the noise, I deal with the stench and the fact that I can hear the pain and death going on around me.

I never realized it could be so bad until Europe, and the hell on earth that was the med tents in the fields and the things I saw beyond. It had been unthinkable after growing up hale and hearty in Kansas miles from any real hospital, the closest thing a small country doctor’s office that saw everything from birth to earaches to men’s arms torn off by threshers. But not much death. Folks did that at home.

In Gotham, it seems people die where they can. And plenty do it in the overfull hallways of St. Swithin’s. The orderlies liked to call it the greatest show on Earth, anything you wanted to see from scabies to syphilis to the effects of a stabbing, all in one place. And for the low, low price of your soul, for glorying in human misery at its peak.

It was a charity hospital, after all. I waded through it, seeing all the avoidable and unavoidable ways they would die, without being able to do a thing to stop it. I turned my mind to John Jones, hard and fast as I could. He could take pain away with a touch, with a gift that made mine look like chump change. You can’t punch decay or disease out. Especially when it was practically three to a bed, and more to the floor, when they ran out.

It wasn’t as bad close to Kane’s room, private and higher up. Wayne money, but that didn’t explain the carefully placed vase of cheap flowers, already brown and wilted from the heat, in the corner of the room.

Someone loved Bill Kane, and she lumbered out of the room, tremendously huge, balancing on improbably tiny feet. Her head, and the thin hair on it, practically brushed the ceiling. Her face was actually kind of lovely, all things considered. And she shimmered, covered in sweat, the day still ratcheting up the degrees.

Baking in the heat, this had to be Clara, the sister that lived in the city. Amanda was two states away.

“Ma’am?” I said, trying to sound like a pencil-pusher. Her eyes narrowed in her enormous face.

“You a cop?” she said, voice as high as a schoolgirl’s. I resisted the urge to peek into her ribcage, to see what kind of miracle of internal resonance could pull that trick.

“Nome, just dotting some i’s and crossing some t’s for the insurance. That’s uh, the comp’ny’s insurance, not nothing personal” I said with a smile. I could almost hear Lois Lane laughing at me, even though she’d been the one to teach me that trick.

“Oh, for Mr. Wayne? Oh, sure, come on through, Bill’d be glad to talk to you!” she said, her voice climbing even higher. Human voices are amazing things.

I thought of Jones again, suddenly, imitating everyone from the president to Mae West. For a moment, I hated Bruce Wayne for bringing it all back. The war and the men in it were a wound that wouldn’t heal, but I’d managed to make it scab over. Then he’d torn it back open again. Of course, he, and those nights in Paris, were the most festering of them all.

Still, there was the job. There was always the job, no matter if I was getting paid or not. I’d learned that even before Metropolis and the paper. And it stayed learned, even after Lex Luthor and the boy I told him was dead.

I walked into Bill Kane’s room, full of the smell of cheap disinfectant and even cheaper flowers with the past on my mind. But I was too into the habit of poking, and the need to use it on Kane blew it out of my thoughts in minutes.

I liked Bill Kane, almost instantly, and I knew Bruce did too. He wasn’t too bright, but he was kind, and dedicated. One of those few times you could say someone didn’t have a mean bone in their body and have it be true.

Bill told me about the job, the night, the beat and the warehouse like they were his wife and kids, his to show off. He even mentioned the street kids, who sometimes clustered around him like moths for safety.

Bill spoke in a thick old Gotham accent, punctuating every other word with "Seh", made almost whistle-like by some missing front teeth. I asked if they'd been knocked out in the attack and he shook his head.

"Oh no, Seh" putting his arm out at the glass with the false teeth by the bed. The nurses had taken them out, scared he'd choke. He’d had them some years, he said proudly, thanks to Bruce Wayne.

Technically thanks to the company then, but I saw the true loyalty, the happy flush of his flesh. The steadiness of his heart despite his age. No lies, no deceit. Whatever had happened, Bill hadn’t been part of it.

“He came up behind me real quiet like and quick. I hit my knees on the pavement going down, got a wicked bruise” at this he pulled off the thin, off-pink hospital blankets to show me, two plum colored circles on stick skinny, grey pale and hairless legs. “And then that angel came, in that silver cah” he said with a love struck grin.

“Oh?” I said, trained over the years to the ways people told stories when they really wanted you to listen. The things they treasured.

“Ah yuh, she saved my life. Comes cruising round the end in ah nice cah, from one of ‘em gambling dens on the rivah, pulls me right inside. Says ‘Mistah, you’ll be just fine’. Blonde and beautiful” he grinned.

This was clearly something Bill had been dying to share. I guess his sisters didn’t believe fallen women could save a man in ways more than the prosaic. He said her name like a prayer.

Bill hadn’t seen the driver, he admitted pretty easily, just the red of the lights ringing his face. A quick glance at his chart told me he was right, the first aid was apparently enough to get him right as rain this fast.

For a moment I wondered which really was likelier, that whoever had stabbed Bill had his man-and-woman waiting around the corner to save him, or if there was a gangster and his gun moll, on their way back from the gambling dens that found it in their hearts to help a hurt man.

I guess I just wanted to believe the way Bill did. Life was probably happier that way.

I thanked him and left. Bill Kane probably couldn’t tell you who the president was, much less make up a lie like this. But somebody had, that much was clear.

I took the winding back stairs, trying to avoid the crush of people.

I was thinking of Bruce Wayne, what he might say when I told him something he probably already knew. What he wanted me to tell him myself.

We’d seen our share of death together, and that’s why it took me a bit to realize I’d gone down one story too many and wound up in the morgue.

It was quieter and cooler than the rest of the building, and that was enough to get me to stay for a minute, just to breathe. It was enough to get me in trouble.

The closest set of doors opened, a pale, skinny man in a doctor’s uniform, struggling with a loaded gurney, the body on it wobbling ominously.

“Some help?” he said without looking at me and I grabbed an end. The wheel was stuck, which meant my strength wasn’t all that helpful. But I lifted and pushed, the doctor shooting me a grateful smile.

His teeth seemed too clean and sharp, eyes small and animal like behind his glasses. Printed neatly on his chest was his last name: LANGSTROM. All his hems were stained with new and old blood, and plenty of other fluids, and I could tell he was used to the scent of death.

“Thanks” he said, stretching his back, long fingered hands practically spanning around his entire waist, when we managed to get it inside the main room, lined with metal tables and drawers. I was grateful he didn’t ask for help putting the body in one of them.

“You’re a reporter right?” he said, looking at me with eyes I could now see were a muddy color. I shrugged with a rueful smile that said _guilty as charged_. “I heard there was a murder” I said. He barked a laugh, an animal sound.

I had the feeling Dr. Langstrom didn’t have living company very often. And those that did were likely in a hurry and a uniform, of one kind or another. Apparently, he liked me, because he elaborated when his mirth trailed off.

“There’s been a few, take your pick” he said waving a long fingered hand at the wall of drawers, “left died here, right got brought in. Unless you’re an ambulance chaser, stick to the DOAs”. I peered at the labels like he was right about me and what I wanted, like any murder would do.

It took me a minute to find the one the kid had talked about. There wasn’t much to go on, just an A. FLECK, RESIDENT: ARKHAM ASYLUM. Wallet in his pocket, easy to track. A quicker case than most Langstrom got, I saw, from the way most of the others said J. DOE.

Fleck had been due for pick up a couple of hours before. I thought about asking Langstrom how a mental patient had been out on the streets but I didn’t think he’d have an answer. Or any I would like.

It took a second to focus my gaze through the metal door, tainted with enough lead to make it difficult to look through. The kid hadn’t exaggerated when he said half the man’s face had been blown away, looking like nothing but stepped on hamburger, even the edges left too red. It made reading the other half to put together a picture practically impossible, eyes flicking back to the wreckage. Then I saw something that made me flinch bad enough to grab Langstrom’s attention.

“The smell?” he asked, and I nodded like it was true. It was the small number tattooed right under Fleck’s collarbone, the stinging slap of bad memories I had tried to leave buried in Europe.

It hadn’t worked so far. But at least I couldn’t try to crawl into a bottle or worse to chase them away, the way I heard others had and did. None of that stuff ever worked on me.

Langstrom offered me a battered tub of mint smelling ointment and I smiled. It was too strong for my senses, thick and greasy, but it was kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [St. Swithin](https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-19341,00.html) is an actual saint, but in this case also a [Nolanverse](https://chrisnolan.fandom.com/wiki/St._Swithin%27s_Home_For_Boys) reference.   
> [Greatest Show on Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_Bailey_Circus) is both callous and an logical reference for the time period.   
> Langstrom is better known as [Man-Bat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Bat) in the comics.


	4. Chapter 4

As cool and calm as the morgue was, compared to the pandemonium upstairs, I didn’t end up staying for very long. I paid Langstrom back for the ointment pretty soon, helping the burly, laconic men from the Asylum put Fleck in the back of a dirty, rusty van, the doors almost too narrow to let us fit him in.

The feeling in there, the smell of sweat and sick and medicine and hurt made me grateful for the ointment dampening it. The two orderlies, mirrors of each other despite the fact that their last names didn’t match, couldn’t answer why Fleck was on the streets either, stuttering over each other with excuses and assuring me all the paperwork was in order, even though I hadn’t asked.

Still, they told me he’d be put to rights in the small potter’s field the Asylum kept on the back patch. That cemetery was a notorious Gotham urban legend that featured often in my crosswords. It wasn’t really a comfort, but it’s not like I had an alternative.

They’d be driving double quick; the heat would make the smell of the body and its rot unbearable within thirty minutes. Not any of my business, not at all.

Langstrom didn’t blink at any of it, the same easy indifference as the cops milling around the hospital, pulling people in and out, or getting stitches themselves. It was just another senseless murder in a city full of them. And Fleck sounded like the kind of guy to get himself into trouble.

But by then, the records office would be closed for lunch and I didn’t want to go back to Bruce yet, to allay his both real and made up fears and have him reach for his pocketbook, feeling his account with me finally squared.

Lois Lane had once told me I could never leave well enough alone. She was trying to tell me we were one and the same, I realize now. One of the worst things about leaving Metropolis, and how I did it, was her face when I did, the confused betrayal, the idea that we weren’t made of the same stuff after all.

For the first month I had a recurring dream of telling her the truth, the boy whose name I refused to think even in my head now in my arms. In the dreams he looked like me, even though I hadn’t seen him in ages and he wasn’t big enough to look like anyone. Not even his mother, the only living blood I had before he came along.

It was Kara I was thinking of as I rose into the sky, shielded from prying eyes by the smog and bustle of the hospital, and the blazing sun above. She’d given birth at home.

The flight didn’t take long, tracing the ugly taupe van through the clouds as it raced through the near empty roads. There was no one to look up.

It wasn’t just because the place was isolated, originally meant as a consumption hospital, the sort of place you checked into and never checked out of. It was everything about it.

Arkham Asylum was an old nightmare of a building, left over from the aftermath of the Civil War, where plenty of people had died bloody on its grounds. There was no shortage of ugly stories or possible hauntings in its halls. Even teenagers didn’t loiter, even on a dare.

It was the sort of place that had a bad air, something beyond the physical that said stay away. Before the war, I would have said it was just the accumulation of years of suffering and dying, by the thousands.

I knew better now, some places were simply bad to the core: they made the pain happen, not the other way around. I was glad to be so far above the place and the misery that practically came off it in waves.

Not that it was all that risky, if anybody in there said they saw a flying man, the chance they’d be believed was slim to none. The only problem was how hard it was to see. Lead had freely been used in making the place, my eyes straining to make out anything clearly.

The smaller outer building, which must be newer, was easier to look at. It was there the van puttered up, straining under the heat and the weight of its passengers. The relief of everyone receiving the body was palpable.

They were glad to be bringing him in safely deceased. More than one said something along the lines of “thank fuck that fucking psycho is dead”. Fleck wasn’t, apparently, the most popular patient. Arkham drew the type.

The two that had been in the van turned to each other, grimly, and put out a fist each. I knew the game, but I was surprised that the winner stayed with the body, getting it ready.

The loser went inside, apparently to report that it was here for burial. Probably a swift one, just making sure all his bits were in the bag before dumping it in the ground. There was already a deep hole ready in the miserable little cemetery, an outburst of inappropriate celebration. He wasn’t getting any deader and they wanted him six feet under yesterday.

It was hard to track the other man to his destination, the lead making me feel almost snow blind, but he moved mostly in the same direction, taking a rickety elevator to the top floor.

The whole place was in an odd state, partly in disrepair, partly not, half of it air conditioned and half of it not. The hallways became steadily less crowded as he got closer to where he was going. And I could smell his sweat.

No more twitching bodies and yelling caregivers. I was glad I couldn’t really see inside, given the picture the sounds painted. And the papers said the new head doctor was trying more humane methods.

The top part of the building where he headed seemed to be newer, as if it had been recently rebuilt, which made it easier to look at.

The money had clearly gone more to the doctors’ comfort than the patients’ wellbeing, going from the cigarette stained laughter I could hear from what sounded like spacious lounges. The patients on the first floor were stacked nearly five to a room.

But not this high up. These got their own place. I wondered if that meant they were the best of the best or the worst of the worst of them.

The thick doors to the rooms? Cells? Were open and the insides empty, labeled: H. DENT, A. FLECK, V. FRIES, P. ISLEY, H. QUINZEL and so on. At least from the side I was looking at. Some still seemed to be occupied, I could feel the markers of a living body, even if I couldn’t tell any more than that.

Maybe they were just away for the day, at group or whatever they did. Or they were loose the way Fleck was. It couldn’t have been intentional, after all.

It was clear that the loser was there to talk to the warden, or head doctor, or whatever it was called. The man in charge of Arkham, going by his plush, palatial office, and the loser’s rabbiting heartrate.

I couldn’t get a good look at him through the lead haze, but I could hear him fine. Feel the way he relaxed, skin untensing, when he heard that _we finally got him back sir, Fleck is dead. No more trouble_.

They hadn’t ordered Fleck killed, I could gather, but they were certainly glad somebody did. Enough to not want to look the gift horse in the mouth from the fact that there were no follow up questions asked. Fleck sounded like a very naughty boy by now.

The warden, his heart rate also far happier and not a drop of sweat on him thanks to how icily cool he kept his office, dismissed the man, with a _Make sure the rest of them are in their rooms by dusk_.

He fled the room, his running footsteps echoing in my ears. He might be on his way to help his partner, already hastily shoving dirt over the body. He hadn’t dropped it in a casket, or, I guessed, even opened the bag it was in, from the sound the dry earth made as it poured down. Kind of like rain.

Once the foot falls faded, the warden laughed. It was the half-crazed laugh of someone who has gotten impossibly good news when all hope seemed lost. I’d heard it plenty, over the years.

He pulled a bottle of expensive smelling liquor from a squeaky drawer and left the room himself. Apparently having a telephone on his huge, well-appointed desk spoiled the effect.

I floated down carefully to the window, surprised to see how richly decorated it all was, my ears straining to not lose track of the heavy click of the rotary phone as the warden called whoever he wanted to share his good fortune with. They took their time to answer.

I couldn’t hear the other end, the line too weak and filled with static, but Arkham was very excited, tripping over himself as he shared the news. He half started a familiar sounding name and caught himself. I filed it away in my head, to make up for the fact that I didn’t manage to keep the number he’d dialed in my head.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it really was the semi-notorious gangster I thought it was. I bet some of the patients were good muscle. And having a doctor willing to call your men crazy could be very helpful.

There wasn’t anything else of interest in the conversation, but I stayed where I was for a while. Through the glass I could see Fleck’s file, open on his desk. The picture reminded me of the cartoons during the war, labeled OUR ENEMIES and exaggerated to the point of being grotesque.

I wondered if he’d been born that way, or if something had happened to make him look like that. Or maybe it was just the madness made visible. The diagnosis column was full of words I didn’t know. The crimes committed/accused section was full of words I did. They were listed alphabetically and started with ARSON. I stopped by the time I reached FAILURE TO PROPERLY DISPOSE OF HUMAN BODY. I didn’t want to know more.

It’s funny, people say sadness gives them a sinking feeling. I tend to rise, instead, floating up and away from it all.

I’d been wrong. There was nothing special about Fleck or his death. Everyone at the hospital had been right. He was just another person that seemed to chase danger until it caught him, like half the people in the city. Someone who didn’t care about life, his or anybody else’s.

The flight back to the city was lonely, the sound of the shovels filling in the grave in parched dirt still ringing in my ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes that’s [Arkham Asylum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkham_Asylum) but I’m taking a lot of the backstory from [Danvers State Hospital](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cemetery-danvers-hospital-criminally-insane) which was like [Arkham but real](https://www.cracked.com/article_19621_6-fictional-places-you-didnt-know-actually-existed.html). 
> 
> Rock paper scissors was in fact [a thing in the West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_paper_scissors#Spread_beyond_East_Asia) by this time. 
> 
> Also [FAILURE TO PROPERLY DISPOSE OF HUMAN BODY is indeed a crime](https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2003-2004/billanalysis/House/htm/2003-HLA-0508-a.htm#:~:text=The%20penal%20code%20does%2C%20however,charge%20for%20burial%20or%20otherwise.) but not quite as awful as it sounds; I just thought the phrase was evocative. And likely something the Joker would be guilty of.


	5. Chapter 5

I looped around the desolate, sunbaked sky a few times, looking at the city from above.

It seemed dirty and dangerous, but somehow noble, too, like a disaster survivor trudging forward into the uncertain future. I remembered the people I’d seen over the years, both in Kansas and across the sea, forced from home by bad harvests and banks and bombs and tanks and neighbors that turned on them. They had walked on. Plenty had found homes. Others lived on Gotham’s streets.

By the time I got the nerve to sink back into the city, turning from a dot in the sky to a man among them, it was late. I picked a tall underused roof I’d spotted weeks ago, and climbed down the rickety, rusty fire escape, finding that there wasn’t much to do with the remains of the day. The records office, with its already erratic and obtuse bureaucratic opening hours, had closed. I could have found my way inside anyway, but I was tired.

There wasn’t anything else to occupy my time, or my mind, either. I’d read every pulp I could get my hands on but the words blurred. I couldn’t bring myself to crack open the classics. The news made me angry, I would see the ways in which I’d do better. And they didn’t have any good crosswords, either. Theaters, no matter what they showed, were too crowded for me. No friends to talk to, unless I called Lois in Metropolis. She was probably still working, which made me sad all over again.

In the end I just walked for a while. I kept thinking about the tattoo under Fleck’s collarbone, wondering why he’d had it done, and the familiar discomfort of the smell of dead bodies that had been left out for a while, no one willing or able to step up to claim and bury them. It wasn’t a comfort to know I wasn’t alone in the knowing.

My father had served in the Great War, the one that had failed to end all wars. Once, his breath thick with corn liquor and a bruise on his face from having to help subdue Mickey MacTavish when he got out of hand at the heart of our small town’s Thanksgiving celebrations, he said something I’ve never forgotten. Some men take longer to come home from war, and some never do at all.

During all my time in Europe I had promised, over and over, in my head, to get back to them. Now I was wondering if I ever did. The farm had seemed so small when I saw it again, my parents so old. Even when I had been visiting from Metropolis, the times before shipping out, or even when I managed to slip away from training in Toccoa for a bit, it hadn't seemed so bleak. The city had also seemed somehow dingy and false, like a front against the real world. Like it had all been replaced with inferior copies while I was gone.

It was the work, the stories, Lois Lane telling me that no returning GI was going to take the slot she'd clawed for herself, Perry looking more like my father than the man himself, that had started to bring me back. And Kara brought it all crashing down again.

I wasn’t angry at her. Not now, anyway. She was just a kid and six feet under besides. But I was angry, all the time, without being able to help it.

Maybe I was angry at myself, for taking the easy way out, leaving town when Lex "asked". I had told myself it was for the kid. But maybe it was for this, a new clean shot. A stay in Bruce Wayne's city.

Maybe it was him I was angry at, for stirring it all up, not letting me pretend I was alright anymore. For not coming to me sooner, a ridiculous, childish hurt. It wasn’t as if I knew him. Or he knew me.

The war wasn't just another place. It was another us. Stripped of pretense and society. Time was different there, when every moment could be the last between life and death. There was no future that way, no past either, just an always now.

When I thought of our passage over there, the sequence was never in order, as if it had happened all at once or from back to front. The orchard in Calais, the bombed out bakery we’d overnighted in close to Eindhoven, the crowded belly of a Transatlantic ship, twice but almost indistinguishable and still completely different, training in Berkshire while we were waiting to fly.

Only one thing stood out on its own. That tiny hotel room in Paris where we spent a week before shipping back. Just the two of us. The ceiling painted robin’s egg blue, the empty squares on the walls where the art had been taken down while the city was occupied.

The big downy bed, so soft we rolled into each other at the middle even when we didn’t mean to. The way the world was new. The Bruce that was there, then, that maybe didn’t exist. The way he smiled. The way he tasted.

I forced my mind back to memories that were safer. Days that bled into each other in a burning Berlin, the skies so dark from ash you couldn’t tell if the sun rose or set. The closest I’d ever been to being sickly. And the men with me through it all: Jordan, Jones, Prince, Allen, Curry. Wayne. He had been Wayne through most of it, but he had been Bruce, too, his tongue on mine in the damp dark.

I knew I should bury it, those things happened, there’d been a war on and exceptions could be made, but I refused to. Or wasn’t able to. And then Bruce Wayne had wandered into my office and looked at me like he’d never touched me and I had still jumped at his call.

Maybe I really was still in that orchard, staring up into a too quiet sky and the fading light until Prince had called me back. They had known me in a way I hadn’t thought possible, accepted me entirely, and Bruce had gone the extra mile. He was still the only lover I’d ever had, and I didn’t know if he knew that.

But it was them, together, that made me miss sleeping in grey mud with gun bursts overhead. They had watched me shrug off bullets and hadn’t blinked. They were like me, all of them, in one way or another. Except for Bruce, but he’d been the one to bring us together. Maybe that’s what he could do to set him apart. The ability to find us. And to let us go. I knew it had been him to put the plan together, at the end of the war and not even OSS had stopped him. If they’d ever even found out about it. They’d been busy with the clean-up, after all. And we’d burned the files, besides, the only tangible proof of what we’d done.

I said we but in truth I’d found them on a field in the night, our boat leaving the next day, seeing Jordan and Prince standing around a bonfire, looking satisfied. Jones, off to side with Curry, had nodded at me. That was when I knew it had been done to the hilt, kept clean, fully taken care of. They’d kept me and Allen in the dark about it until it was finished, and I couldn’t blame them. We knew each other too well for that after all.

I hadn’t seen any of them since. Safer that way. Lonelier too. When I was a kid, I’d been used to it, I didn’t know any different. Now I did.

A tiny bell jangled above me as I trudged into the reddish light of the only place in Gotham I actually liked to eat. Myrtle looked up at me as I shouldered my way inside. The door stuck a little and I had to be careful to push it just hard enough. Then she looked again, startled at whatever she saw in my face.

I hope it wasn’t too bad. It was a good place. Old fashioned. And Myrtle reminded me of Pete Ross’ mother, tending their own family joint in Smallville. The same kind of smile, the same small white teeth in a dark face. She’d died while I was overseas. Pete too, somewhere in the Pacific. I wasn’t sure if the diner was still there.

“Hun, you look like forty miles of bad road” she said, eyes concerned. “Set on down and I’ll get you a plate”. There was no need to order. The diner only made one thing for each meal, different every day, and there was no argument. The only selection was for pies, all excellent. I preferred the cherry one. The same color as the sticky vinyl booth I had sunk into like a stone.

There, surrounded by the smell of smoke and grease, I felt I could breathe for the first time since I’d seen Bruce Wayne again. Really, I knew the problem was that he wasn’t _my_ Bruce, not anymore, and even though I’d know that had to be true it still hurt.

He hadn’t tried to seek me out. Prince sent anonymous post cards. Jordan had left some whiskey once, on my birthday. I could smell he’d done it himself, hovering in my doorway. But nothing from Bruce.

I decided I would do this job, then be the one to walk away. Maybe it was time to go home. I wasn’t sure if I meant Metropolis, but finding out would be a good start.

The loaded plate clinked as Myrtle set it down, her motherly concern so evident I almost hugged her waist. Instead I tucked in.

Another thing to like about this place was that no one stared or noticed when I ate things that should be too hot, or didn’t sweat or shiver enough with the weather. Doc’s was quiet.

You ate, you left, and you smiled at the waitress. You didn’t tell her you were barely sleeping. You didn’t tell her you knew your day was going to make it worse, reminding you of the guy you used to be. A good guy. Someone who could make a difference. I didn’t know what kind of guy I was now.

I tipped her generously before going home, without saying a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s [the Justice League](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_League#Background)! The founding seven members, anyway. [Toccoa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toccoa,_Georgia#Currahee_Military_Museum) and [Berskhire](https://www.ww2-airborne.us/18corps/101abn/101_overview.html) kind of make sense, but I don’t think any unit was in all the places mentioned. Also, the [OSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services) was key in WW2 and was what came before the CIA.


	6. Chapter 6

I was awake with the dawn, and, like the rest of the city, covered in sweat. I never slept well after too sunny days, full of energy and strength, even by my standards. But this time I couldn’t blame the heat that refused to wane.

It was all on my mind, playing tricks on me. I’d paced in the dark in my shoebox apartment, willing myself to stay inside no matter how restless I was, until I’d managed to feel tired enough to sleep. There’d been no light, no sun, in my dream either.

I was running through a dark, thick forest, explosions behind me. I knew my men were ahead of me, I just had to catch up. But I was so tired, my legs so heavy. I couldn’t call for them or give away our position. And I was falling behind.

I’d woken with a start, lifting a few feet into the air. I nearly broke the bed when I dropped. It was already muggy and damp even though the sun had barely risen. I watch it climb in the sky and considered.

I could just tell Br-Wayne what I knew, which wasn’t much. Cash my check and walk away. There was no need to check out the records or anything else.

Except that I couldn’t do that. I could pretend to forget the war, I could leave Metropolis, I could let Lois Lane think I was a quitter. I could let a boy grow up in the far end of Kansas thinking I was his father. But this was a step too far. I couldn’t live with this, too.

One day, that boy would come to me for answers and I wanted to be a man that could look him in the eye. My mother’s letters said they were the same color as mine and Kara’s.

So I shrugged on my trench coat and headed out. The asphalt felt soft under my feet and the coat got more than one odd look tossed my way, but it was better like that. People tended to stare harder if I wasn’t sweaty like the rest of them.

I wasn’t the biggest freak on the street today, if anything people probably thought I had a gun on me. Or maybe the look on my face was bad enough to get them to jump out of my way.

The records office seemed abandoned when I got there, by foot, wanting to give them time to open and not wanting to risk another crammed streetcar that wouldn’t get half the riders close to where they really needed to go. I’d been pushing my senses too hard lately, switching the strain to my legs seemed best.

Still, the big white building, and its false column facade, seemed a relic of a bygone time. Only the detritus and dirt smeared on it by Gotham’s nighttime face landed it in the real world.

I bought a hot dog from a nearby cart, like half the building’s workers it seemed, drenching it in sauces. It tasted good and terrible all at once and I was glad that I had a stronger stomach than most. Then I watch the building come to slow, groaning life.

The bulbs were old and flickered, but they were necessary even in the daytime. The AC wheezed and clanked, overworked from the size. It didn’t even need to be on, the walls so thick and stony that the inside was always slightly chilly. Or it was where the lowliest drones worked, the offices were meant to be airy and light but in this heat wave they had turned to ovens.

There wasn’t as much noise from activity as I expected, footsteps echoing alone. Understaffed, what a surprise.

Eventually, my watch said the place was open to the public and I climbed the steps, feeling how powdery the stone was becoming. Like most of Gotham, the proud facade hid an interior crumbling disrepair. Unless you lived up where the manors and the money were.

I hesitated one last time at the door, done up to look like real copper but really just some cheap alloy to my eyes. I felt like I was balancing on the edge of a cliff. And then someone ran up behind me, a harried looking secretary type, young and unsure, stocking coming undone from a rip she hadn’t noticed yet. I held the door open for her, barreling past without thanking me. Then I followed her into the gloom, letting the door swing shut behind me.

Records was deep in the belly of the building, the air still and frozen. Standing in front of a tiny, ancient woman, as uniformly grey as her surroundings, glaring at me with eyes magnified by Coke bottle thick glasses, I realized how stupid my old plan had been.

Even with x-ray vision and all the time in the world, there’s no way I would have managed to find what I was looking for on my own.

Sheepishly, I signed her ledger and handed over some identification (KENT, CLARK. SMALLVILLE, KS and so on) as she eyed me like I was trying to get my hands on her heirloom jewelry. She admonished me to wait without a word but with a raised finger and I rocked back on my heels, marveling at the silence. Not even rats. They probably withered under the old woman’s glare.

I had to strain to hear the floors above, through the thick stone, the strains of clicking heels and droning male voices.

The lady walked so quietly that I jumped at the thump of her dropping the ledger on her desk. I gave her a stuttering thank you and headed to the poorly lit visitors tables. They were dusty.

The ledger felt somehow impossibly solid and delicate in my hands, which felt bigger and clumsier than ever. I opened it as carefully as I could, wondering what sort of punishment the woman behind the desk inflicted on book breakers.

It was, as expected, fairly boring stuff. Land deeds and disputes and building permits. Dry, emotionless paperwork, the properties mostly staying in the same few hands with the same few names for generations. Wayne to Wayne Enterprises, Queen to Wayne Enterprises, Montoya to Xue. The whole story of the not quite Narrows but not quite nice neighborhood laid out, depressing and uneventful.

Until five months ago. That’s when it all changed. The names started to shift and fast, almost every bit of it had recently changed ownership. And something about the names, so common they stood out, was nagging me.

That’s when I saw it. _Harleen Quinzel_. Each name unusual. Next to each other? Evidence. Though I wasn’t sure of what.

All I knew were two, irrefutable things. Bill Kane had said his savior angel’s name was Harleen. And H. QUINZEL had been written on of the empty cells in Arkham.

Looking back, so had the other names. Harvey Dent. Victor Fries. Mental patients, used by their doctors, or just Arkham himself, surreptitiously, as place holders for the deeds, through the machinations of the man on the phone.

No Arthur Fleck, but that was no surprise, from the way they had talked about him. Too volatile for this kind of work, given his file. The only question left was why.

I looked closer, seeing how low the purchase amounts were, the care taken so no one would notice what was happening and hike up their price.

Thumb awkwardly tucked into the book, no longer overly concerned with whether or not I damaged it, so I could flip to the map pasted at the beginning. Slowly, I made the shape of it in my head. Oddly familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place. But it nagged at me, like an incomplete puzzle on my mother’s sewing room table, even if it would never turn out to be a basketful of kittens or a seaside vista.

As I flipped back and forth, I whittled my way to the end of the list. The latest purchase, made the morning after the day Wayne had come to see me.

The name printed there wasn’t from the Asylum. Or anything I associated with Gotham.

For a moment, the whole world was made of cardboard and I was the barely contained flood. I concentrated on breathing.

The snake like shape in my head resolved. I knew what it was. They bitched about it on the radios and in the streetcars. A pipe dream that was, apparently, finally coming true. And all it took was a few devious machinations, the removal of families under false pretenses and the abuse of the mentally ill.

I breathed out slow and long, enough that little ice crystals formed on the edge of the table. It might be hours before they melted down here, kept cold and dark. But the book itself was alright. The old woman couldn’t complain about me. Though she probably would.

The important thing was that I hadn’t lost control. This wasn’t the Netherlands. I was alright. I told myself that until I could make my hands loosen around the ledge.

There was only one thing left to do her. Gingerly, like it might bite, I flipped the book over entirely. There was a borrowing card, like you would find on a library book, recording everyone that had dared ask to see it.

My name was listed last, alongside the date, in the woman’s perfect Copperplate handwriting. The one written above was the same as the last name inside the book. It was dated two and a half months before. Plenty of time to figure it out.

I breathed deep again. This time my anger rose slowly, like water to a boil. Mechanically, I left the room.

I turned the book in, smiling into the woman’s glare, clutching the book to her chest like something precious. Her grip was tight enough that some dust shot up from the pages to dot her chin. No wonder she had turned grey.

I took the stairs up to the exit two at a time, yanking the doors open and blinking at the suddenness of the light outside. I closed my eyes for a moment, basking in the glow.

The city smelt ripe, bodies and trash and hot asphalt and exhaust, baking but alive. I could hear the brief upticks in people’s heartbeats from any one of a thousand things: a pretty girl, a snarling dog, a madman like me smiling up at the sun in a trench coat in the middle of a heatwave. Like butterfly wings, rising and falling.

Would they care? If they knew what I had learned, if I splashed in on the front page like I was still printable, would it matter in Gotham? Probably not.

But it mattered to me. To the man I wanted to be. I breathed deep again, steeling myself.

I knew where I had to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Hot dog carts](https://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-hot-dogs-335360) were a thing by then.


	7. Chapter 7

The office was a corner one, with a breathtaking 70th floor view of the city from the heart of its financial district. From up here, the city was a polished blue model, to be made and unmade and played with until you were bored.

It was, of course, immaculate to the point that I wondered how often the janitorial services came in. Maybe twice a day. Or, barring that, it didn’t see much use; the trashcan was empty but it didn’t smell. Maybe the only thing thrown away here was on paper.

Everything was tasteful, the upholstery leather, the desk oak, the paintings timeless but classic. No modern art, naturally.

The technological set-up was state of the art. And, as I suspected, hidden in trick drawers, a radio tuned to the police’s frequency and a polished, loaded gun.

There was a funhouse mirror feeling in my head, the way I both could and couldn’t see Bruce Wayne in this space. The three-piece suited businessman who didn’t sweat? Yes. The muddy soldier with three days’ worth of stubble? No.

Outside, the heavy double doors, the knobs gleaming and golden, I could hear expensive shoes clicking toward me. I didn’t even need superior sense to do it.

They were women’s shoes, struggling to keep up with the quiet panther glide I was sure no one else in the building could hear. Her heart beat was worryingly high, but her voice came out steady as she said “Are you sure you want to lunch at Dorsia’s? It’s just it’s practically time already and-” “I’m sure you can do it” said a voice that fit in perfectly with the expensive fixtures and moneyed atmosphere.

I’d never heard it before. Not really. The thought was almost sad enough to puncture my anger. Almost. Instead, it was kindling.

I was standing in the half-light made by the crossbeams of sun and shadow where wall met window, by design. The golden knob turned and there was a sick satisfaction at the helpless shock on his face when he saw me. The same guilty pleasure of pressing on a bruise to make sure the pain was still there.

He recovered quickly, disappointed me immediately, though there was no reason to feel betrayed. At that at least. I had firsthand experience with his skills at deception.

“On second thought, Fiona, you’re right. Scrap lunch”, he said, without a hitch in his voice or his stride. I didn’t even get a glimpse of Fiona’s relieved face, but I could feel it, the sudden loss of tension from all her systems.

All of it seemed to have bled into Bruce Wayne’s office, instead, as he shut the door on her.

There was something faintly ridiculous about the way we stared each other down, equal parts farce and high noon showdown. It was silly enough, serious enough, for me to dig in my heels and say nothing.

To my surprise, he broke first. Or just refused to keep playing. “Want a drink?” he said, ambling over to the elegant wooden liquor cabinet. I suppose the office wasn’t complete without one.

It was nowhere near the gun, but then he’d know that would be no help here. His voice had lost the honeyed tone. He sounded like the soldier again.

“Whatever you’re having” I said, shifting my weight, a subtle reminder. Locked in a room with anyone else, I’d be calm. But he knew how to cut me to the quick, in ways more than metaphorical.

He measured out ice and poured, calm, heart rate so steady it looped back into odd. Two club sodas, on the rocks with lime. He slid mine to me across his meticulously polished desk with the ease of a seasoned barman, careful to stay well on the other side of the furniture. The cliff’s edge feeling was back, and stronger than ever.

“I assume you’re here with a result” he said, making it sound like an order. I hummed noncommittally. “A question, really. Did you think I would forget or did you just think I was stupid?” my tone was even. A small miracle.

His face was stony. I could practically see him working on the answer even though that trick was Jones’, not mine. His heart rate had stayed steady. He was well trained, experienced.

“No” he said, finally. “I didn’t think you’d forget. I knew you’d see it and know” he said into the clear cut crystal of his glass. The final name on the list was Maurice Malone. His favorite alias, the alleged name of our unit commander, as real as John Bolton or Samuel Culper. Whenever we had to mention it we called him Matches, like the brand.

I had almost believed it was a coincidence. Or wanted to. But the same name had been the one on the borrowing card and I had known it had to be him.

There was a plot here, and I could almost see all its threads. I knew its shape already: an S.

Before I showed my cards, I had something else I needed to ask. “Were you in on what happened to Bill Kane?”

There was an ice water shock of relief in my gut from the way his poker face slipped, showing him indignant and betrayed and plainly pissed off that I would accuse him of that, that I could even think it. At least he wasn’t as much of a stranger as I had thought.

“No” he spat out, “that happened the way I told you”, in the same tone of voice he’d used before throwing an SS commander off a building. Prince had been ready to catch him but that was beside the point.

I was on my own here. It shouldn’t have been thrilling. Turns out some secret part of me was longing for combat. Or at least the feeling that something was worth fighting _for._

He started to say something else, his eyes blazing in his too still face. I raised a finger, feeling like I really was riding the tiger now.

“No, no, one last question. I get three, like in a story” I grinned. I couldn’t help it. He openly glared this time. Then he gave me a carefully calculated rich boy Wayne gesture. A dismissive hand flap that said continue.

“Did you know about the mental patients?” His eyes narrowed and this time there was no relief. It hadn’t been the question he was expecting so he gave away the answer. Yes.

“You son of a bitch” I breathed. He flinched. There wasn’t any satisfaction in it for me.

“Why me? Why in the hell did you come to me? Did you think I’d cover for you? Help you? Be your leg breaker?” I half pleaded half snarled. This time he smiled, happy to see me in the wrong.

“I think that’s far more than three” Bruce Wayne smirked in his who knows how many hundreds of dollars suit.

“Fuck you” I said and saw it hit home. He swirled the ice in his glass, picking his next words carefully.

Probably remembering the last time he saw me this out of sorts, I ripped apart Panzers.

“Because you’d do the right thing. You wouldn’t stop at Bill. You’d put it together. And you’d go to the press. You’re a reporter, after all” he said, acidly, flatly.

“And keep your name out of it, right?” Because if he said clean, he could be Mayor. He’d win. “I haven’t done anything wrong. The Asylum scheme has nothing to do with me. That’s-” “That’s exactly it. You knew and you did nothing”.

The glare was deeper than I’d ever seen it, as bad as earthquake lights. “ _Nothing?_ ” and I remembered why he’d been in charge of a unit full of people that could very literally move mountains.

“When I found out” he ground out, and that was only three months ago my mind helpfully supplied. The first thing he’d done was make a strategic purchase for a fair price to block his opponent. What he said instead was “I did my homework. I’d need to prove a crime, or get evidence for the press. With the courts in this town, the second option is best but both of those things are easier with your abilities, Kent. And this being Gotham, your name too. It’s not enough to know that the man behind this is called-” “Cobblepot” I supplied. The name of the man on the other end of the phone.

“That took me three weeks. What did you need? Three seconds? And even though half this town knows he’s a gangster, the other half is on his take. He has enough pull to bury this right now, but not if it was all over the papers. Nothing pushes this city’s buttons like the train” he said with a worrying undertone of rage.

He didn’t explain, either expecting that I already knew or that this was enough for me to figure it out. I decided to choose the more flattering option. The properties, in a rough S shape, laid out the perfect route for the mythical train the city had been begging for years.

It had be rumored for ages that construction was just about to begin, but no one ever knew where. If someone managed to pin it down, to get leaked contracts and documents and blueprints, they could buy the properties for pennies and sell them to the city at an extortionary rate. Especially if the public was pushing them to close the deal.

Or, if you wanted to be Mayor, just donate the land yourself. So long as they managed to have all the land in hand before anyone got wise. It hadn’t been what he’d done. Or he wouldn’t be in this mess. Someone else had.

“You could have just told me. You realize that right? We could have been working together for real” I said at last, into his furious, haughty silence.

My ice cubes had melted, the glass nearly overflowing. I wanted to still be righteous and irate, but his indignance, his blind confidence, had pierced it, like lancing a boil. The infection was already bleeding away. I didn’t want to stay angry at him. I wasn’t sure I knew how to.

He smiled at me for a millisecond, disarmed, like he knew what I was thinking. And, impossible for anyone without my sense to perceive, shook his head. There was, of course, something else he wasn’t saying.

The thing that might make all this ruse make sense. “You can trust me” I said, willing him to believe it. I had taken bullets for him, but then again, that was no hardship for me. I could tell him about the boy I realized.

Trust for trust. Someone to share the burden, to know my mother had named him Conner. He looked up at me and I felt that cliff’s edge feeling again, at the blue eyes on blue.

This time I knew he was right there with me, about to tip over. We’d go together.

Then the scanner chirped urgently. The voice cutting through the static was frantic and whatever he saw in my face made Bruce vault over the desk to reach in and turn up the volume.

“-LL UNITS, ARKHAM ASYLU-” we both knew the string of code numbers that followed, what they meant. Homicide and the rest on down.

“Go” he growled, my commanding officer again, and I didn’t need to be told twice.

I opened the immaculately polished window closest to me and took flight, unheeding of prying eyes, following the cacophony of sirens pouring in the right direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picture this in what’s basically the [Chrysler building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Building#Private_offices).
> 
> That [police radio](https://www.bktechnologies.com/the-origin-of-two-way-police-radio-communication/#:~:text=On%20April%207%2C%201928%2C%20Detroit,by%20radio%20engineer%20Frank%20A.) is both accurate and possible if unlikely. 
> 
> Yes that’s an [American Psycho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpUWjff_OcM) (and therefore Christian Bale) reference.
> 
> [Fiona](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/fiona/4005-113888/) really was one of Bruce’s secretaries.
> 
> [Westerns and high noon showdowns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_\(genre\)) were a thing and my love for the [ Culper spy ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culper_Ring) is known.
> 
> I couldn’t help putting in [Matches Malone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_DC_Comics_characters#Matches_Malone), but to my knowledge there isn’t a Malone Matches brand. Shh just go with it.
> 
> Here’s [what it means to _ride the tiger_](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/ride+a+tiger#:~:text=take%20on%20a%20responsibility%20or,under%20control%20by%20sheer%20force.) and why you should be wary of [earthquake lights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light).


	8. Chapter 8

The flight was as fast as I could make it; helped by the fact I already knew the way. But that was no comfort.

I knew, no matter what, I’d be too late. And what was likely to be waiting for me when I got there.

I was the first on the scene, the desolation so familiar it was acid in my gut. From the sky the scorch marks and tire tracks looked like scars on the earth. It was so dry it cracked easily, kicked up into the air to become dust.

I had to land, not that there were any open eyes around me to see it. At least the building had been too old, too inexpertly set alight, to burn properly. The wind, pretty strong this far from the windbreak of the city’s buildings, had done the rest.

The first thing I noticed through the oily, smoky haze was that there weren’t enough heartbeats and my voice trip wired in my throat. But the smell made it clear that there weren’t that many corpses. Death has a cloying scent.

Dealing with the missing, or, more likely, escaped, could come later. The countryside wasn’t that big, they would probably head to the city. Besides, I knew the place was understaffed and, if you were high up enough, overpaid.

I steeled myself and turned my senses to the building, to see what might be left. I was focused enough to catch a small but specific, thready heartbeat inside. Almost fully faded, a bad sign. It was in the warden’s office, by the location. The one place there might be some sort of answer for all of this.

I rushed to it, passing the shredded corpses of the two orderlies that I had followed from St. Swithin’s, laid at the open double doors, like a cat’s sacrificial present to its owner.

Before the war, my stomach would have lurched. But they were casualties and there was a survivor, or a witness. Maybe even the one to call the cops.

Triage sent me past them, and the locked cafeteria pantry where a cluster of heartbeats soaked in the sour scent of fear huddled, scared but uninjured. Jury was out on whether they were the lucky ones. Memory always remains. Even if you had superpowers.

I’d never wanted to ask Jones for that favor, no matter how I’d been tempted. It was like the war again, the eerie silence. There were no more signs of life for miles. Human, anyway. There were birds, by the next ridge there were pigs, both wild and not, then farms proper. Most of them belonging to immigrants that couldn’t get better land. My mind did what it could to dim the horror, but it wasn’t enough. Reality couldn’t be denied.

I knew I was on the right track from the heavy scent of blood. It was worse than I’d thought, inside the building. Whatever underlying evil had been waiting was now made manifest, everywhere.

Whoever had done this had wanted to break this place down to its base components: horror and cruelty. The walls were full of holes, broken pipes leaking, exposed wires hissing sparks and curling like snakes. Linens and glass and pills and stray needles all over the floor, a wicked version of confetti. All of the floors were signs of what had happened here: footsteps and drag marks and scratches and puddles of all sorts of origins, bodily and otherwise. Beds and trolleys scattered around like discarded children’s toys.

There were words written on the walls. They were incoherent, they were obscenities, bad jokes, getting worse as I made my way up to whoever was left after this, not strong enough to find the others to huddle in a small group against the rest of the world, the way humanity always had.

I did what I always did when the world turned into Hades before me. The trick that had gotten me through the rest of the war, when the words became true. Remembered my father’s voice, reading aloud to me as a boy, the classics: _“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.”_ Most of the time, now, that was true. Now it was hard to hold in my mind.

The warden was dead when I got there.

I recognized his face, detached from the rest of him. They must have hated him the most, going from the state of what was left, scattered all over. His very nice office had been turned into a scene from Dante’s _Inferno_.

The heartbeat I heard wasn’t his. It came from behind a large leather couch, the kind you’d expect in a headshrinker’s office, though it didn’t seem used. Not until today, at least. Curled behind it, trying to make herself small, was a woman.

At first I thought her hair was red. Then I realized that it was blood. And not all hers.

She gasped when she saw me, or registered she saw me. “Shh, shh” I said, gentling her like an animal, like a frantic colt on the farm. Humans regress when hurt, scared, cornered. Probably I would too, if anyone could get me that way.

She grabbed my hand with the strength of the dying. I didn’t want to wonder how it was that she had come to be here and what she had seen. All I cared about then was how she was hurt and how I could help.

As she turned, as best she could, I saw part of her name, printed on her coat: JOAN.

Joan hissed when I pressed on her stomach, keeping the blood inside, keeping her alive. Her nails scraped my skin as she flailed. Joan was a fighter, that much was clear. I just waited for her to settle.

“He was dead” she said, face covered in tears and spit. I knew the sorts of things the wounded said, the unreal worlds they went to in their heads. “He did this, but he was dead. He came _back_ ” she said, eyes wide and wild and white. It wasn’t all from her injuries.

“Who hun?” I said, to keep her focused, distract her from what I was about to do. I only had one way to save her and I had to be quick. If she lived it would seem like a delusion, a bad dream. I hoped.

“Fle-hECKK” she shrieked as I burned her flesh shut with my eyes, the room glowing red. I shut my mind to the smell. “He was dead” Joan said, almost beatific, and fainted dead away.

I rocked back on my heels. The sirens were closing in now. There was a scalpel glinting close by, dropped and kicked away in all the terrible excitement. I lunged for it, burning the tip black to drop by her hand. I’d pull the lighter from her pocket, wrapped by a crushed pack of cigarettes, and put it in her other hand. No one would look to closely at it, ask the necessary questions. They’d want to believe.

The sirens leaped closer, like baying hounds catching the scent. Time was running out. But someone had done this. Someone angry, and just as crazy.

If it was Cobblepot, looking to silence Arkham after Bruce wouldn’t budge, he’d used the patients he’d been loaned. And if it wasn’t, it was worse than earthquake lights. It was the ocean fleeing the shore to come back in a wave big enough to swallow us all.

The phone in the next room was smashed to pieces against the wall, the phonebook turned to shreds. Not that I thought the warden was the type to keep incriminating information written down. And any funny accounting wouldn’t have been kept in here anyway.

His desk was a loss too, the drawers pulled out and many thrown out the window. Nothing useful, even the trick drawers full of nothing but broken bottles of expensive liquor and crushed tobacco.

The files were scattered all over the place, some too damaged to read. It didn’t seem deliberate, just a side effect of the mayhem. Another bad omen.

Cobblepot would want the evidence eliminated, and thoroughly. Even for me, there wasn’t enough time for a real search. So I decided to start with the names I knew and hope that I would get lucky enough to leave very soon.

There would be questions I couldn’t answer if I stayed. And there weren’t enough words to say how little I wanted to come back later. Even if it might help the smell hanging in the air.

The broken windows helped a bit. Joan kept breathing, a whistling sound coming through her nose, behind the couch. No infection, I hoped.

Fries didn’t look like Fleck, not even a bit, much less for a scared, injured woman to confuse the two in the chaos. Besides, his file said he wasn’t violent, or disorganized. Not the man you’d choose for this.

Quinzel was a woman, clearly, and blonde. If she hadn’t been she was the likely candidate, her file making it clear that she had been Fleck’s paramour and his perfect, horrific, deranged other half.

Third time was the charm.

Wedged between the desk and an overturned chair, was the file for Harvey Dent. He had the coloring, the hair, the height and enough of half a face to pass for Fleck. The other half of it was distorted by a port wine stain that seemed to have been poured perfectly done the middle of his face.

It was staggeringly familiar, the dull grey eye and the bright, alive one right next to it. Hard to put the two together even when the picture was staring right at me, half grinning half snarling.

He was violent enough, said the file. And organized enough. And then there was a detail that managed to stop my heart, if just for a second, in my chest.

The missing piece of the puzzle, clicking into place, and dropping the bottom out of it all.

Dent’s birthday was June 11th, and there was a tiny note amended to it: notice of an identifying sign, as if the birthmark wasn’t enough.

It read, in neat feminine handwriting, that tattooed, right under his collarbone, was the symbol for Gemini. I flipped to the picture, saw that, in fact, it looks just like the Roman numeral for “two”.

To me anyway. On the body in the morgue, with its ravaged face, the edges left too red. Dent had resembled Fleck. And he had been easy to get to, with no one to miss him in time, Arkham and Cobblepot assuming he was with the other one.

Fleck had never been dead. Just biding his time.

And it looked like he was just getting started on his second chance at life.

The sirens wailed again, at the door, and I was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to put in an [Odyssey](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/850164-be-strong-saith-my-heart-i-am-a-soldier-i) reference, I’m sorry.
> 
> [Joan Leland](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/joan-leland/4005-82715/) is both an actual Arkham doctor and very tied to Joker and Harley.
> 
> I’m a [Gemini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_\(astrology\)) too.


	9. Chapter 9

I spotted it quickly, not even realizing I was looking for it until I saw it, breaking right through my thoughts. Pulled over discreetly on the side of the road, hidden by strong trees and the dip of the dirty turnoff was a rusty old Ford, colored somewhere between blue and grey.

Behind the wheel, leaning back into the shadows to hide his face, was Bruce Wayne.

He was waiting for me, at the midpoint on the way back to Gotham. Somewhere no one but me would notice. Or see me descend from the sky.

I saw that he’d changed into something more comfortable for running. Or fighting. A lot less expensive if it got ruined, too.

That was another terrible sign, but I couldn’t help the way I relaxed when I saw him, the feeling of having someone by my side. That I wasn’t alone anymore.

I slipped into the passenger’s seat with a groan, grateful for the canteen full of water he’d left out for me, eager to wash away the taste of blood and cruelty. I’d need to throw my shoes out after this.

I drank deep and it was his old canteen, I realized, carried back all the way from Europe. I recognized the pattern of dents, a constellation of close calls survived. At least one was from me slamming him into the ground. It had been a long time since I’d felt so comforted.

Of course, that meant that the blow wasn’t far behind. “It wasn’t Cobblepot” he said, grim, and I nodded at the bad news. I trusted his resources. Cobblepot might have been reasoned with. And I knew what I knew.

He was silent, and I was careful. He’d taken his time to come to me. And I had begun to feel that it wasn’t Bill Kane’s injury that had tipped his hand. I had to share the situation, even though I felt like I was handing him a triggered grenade.

“It was Fleck. He’s alive” I said, gauging his reaction. “Ah” he said, then wrenched open the door and vomited neatly.

My guts frosted over and I balled my hands into fists. I couldn’t touch him no matter how much I wanted to. I knew he wouldn’t take it well.

He’d been just as prim the last time I’d seen him lose the contents of his stomach. It had been when we liberated the camp. He hadn’t been the one I’d had to worry over. Jordan was Jewish. He’d cried as the green light raged up around him. The only time I had felt the pain of a burn had been when I’d put my arms around him.

“That’s a problem” Bruce said at last, eyes closed. “What he wants most is to watch this city, and everyone in it, burn” he added, dissonantly calm.

For a moment he hesitated, I could hear his throat working as he swallowed. “And with the crates of guns and grenades he stole from Cobblepot before burning down one of his favorite warehouses today I think he can do it”.

He sounded the way he had deep in the forests of Europe, ordering us forward under impossible odds. He had nicknamed me Superman, and I had wanted to be. I did again. “Alright” I said, “and how do we stop him?”

Bruce laughed, dark and bitter, and I was myself again, a failed PI and disgraced reporter that had been run out of town.

“Maybe if you kill me” he said, and the old wellspring of anger surged up, a resounding _no fucking way_. “If you don’t give me a straight answer about this, maybe I will” I said, fists already coming up. I’d never unballed them, and it looked like I’d been right not to.

“You’re all acting like he’s the Boogeyman. Just who the hell is this guy?” I said, because I couldn’t figure it out. Fleck was terrible, yes, but on the scale of things, he was a petty monster. He probably wasn’t even the worst thing in Arkham, much less Gotham.

But Bruce hadn’t come to me, hadn’t wanted to involve me, until after he thought Fleck was dead. He’d come running almost as soon as he’d heard. And bought more land to block his opponent. Because it wasn’t Cobblepot that was holding him back.

I don’t know if he’d come to me in relief or with the need to have me double check Fleck was in the ground. He’d been right to doubt. And it was the sort of thing he knew I’d do.

Bruce looked away from me, and at somewhere out beyond the dirty windshield. He didn’t fall off the cliff’s edge. He jumped.

“Arthur Fleck is the only man I’ve ever truly been afraid of” he said, at the glass, and started the car. Below the grinding roar of the engine I could hear him forcibly control his breathing. Prince had taught him that trick.

In a spray of gravel from the sharp turn he took we were on the road again, headed back to Gotham. He swallowed, deep and slow, and spoke. “The first time I saw him I was six. Still scared of the dark” and other things, I supposed. He was just a boy after all. I remembered the things that I glimpsed in Fleck’s file and suppressed a shudder. If I interrupted now, he’d never speak of it again, of that I was sure.

“He was fourteen but of course to me he looked like a grown man. He grabbed me through our gate, rambling, I had no idea what he was saying. Alfred heard the screams and pulled me back. My arm broke. My father set it himself. He was a doctor, you know” I did. I don’t think there was a soul in Gotham who didn’t.

“He ran, of course. They didn’t catch him. That night I heard my mother scream at him. She never raised her voice and I thought it was my fault”. Of course he did. That was how children were. The boy flashed in my mind and I buried the twist of guilt. It did me no good right now.

“I didn’t find out the full story for years, but that stuck with me. And though I didn’t know it, so did he. One year our greenhouse burned down. The next, our tires slashed. The dogs got sick, something put in their food. Little things, but enough. Never constant. I don’t know how much you managed to find out, but he was in and out of institutions. Hospitals, group homes, juvenile detention, later prison. Then there was the war. It was the longest he went unchecked. And I, the person he wanted to hurt the most, was an entire ocean away”. Bruce’s parents were dead by then, I knew, and from the way he was telling it, not by Fleck’s hand. I wondered if that was a comfort. To either of them.

“They had him back in Arkham by the time I got back. Before that, he’d been by the Manor. Alfred told me. He hadn’t forgotten me” and you hadn’t forgotten him I thought. I remembered how oddly free we’d all felt over there, during the war. Our old enemies left behind in some other place, because all we were focused on where the ones we faced on the frontline.

“About five months ago, someone shot at my car. It wasn’t the first thing, but it was the one I couldn’t ignore. I got lucky. It’s how I found out that Cobblepot was in league with Arkham. And his first taste at how volatile Fleck really is” he said, sounding more like the eager hunter I knew.

I wondered if those bullets had done more than put him on the chase. Maybe it had moved him out of the deep freeze coming back seemed to have put us in. He had never written, but I knew he’d taken his time to leave Europe. Staying for clean-up, they’d said.

The trees moved past us, growing thinner. Bruce had been silent long enough that I worried that he might be done. It turned out he was just getting started.

He breathed deep again, the needle on the speedometer jumping suddenly. We were almost in the city now. The sun starting to sink, the heat refusing to abate. I’d barely noticed. And he was too focused on his story.

“Arthur Fleck is convinced he’s my half-brother” Bruce ground out like it hurt, gripping the wheel like we were being chased, eyes locked on the horizon. “It’s a delusion” he added, almost sounding like he was entirely sure. But I caught the tiniest undertone, the hint of doubt.

Not that he would ever admit it. He loved his father. He had lost him too. Bruce forced his breath out through his nose, like a horse, forced to slow the car as the buildings started to swallow us up. It was oddly comforting, driving into the snaggle-toothed skyline. It was familiar by now. To us both.

“His mother was a woman named Penny. Penny Fleck. She worked in our house as a maid, but only for a month. Long before I was born, of course. She was always odd. She told my mother the Devil lived in our cellar. Three people had to carry her out the day she started screaming at things only she could see. My mother felt badly for her, paid for a good, private hospital”. He paused, the hurt more raw. Thomas Wayne might be Gotham City’s patron saint, but Martha Wayne was her son’s. He had carried her picture through the war, close to his heart. As far as I knew, only Prince and I had seen it.

Bruce swallowed, gathering himself again, and kept going. “It didn’t take long for them to find she was pregnant. Some doctor, or orderly or other patient. Penny told them it was my father’s. Told them the story of an impossible love affair. Places they couldn’t have gone, conversations they couldn’t have had. He’d been in Europe for half of it. She was sure, of course. It’s the story she told her son. And killed herself when he was six. That was her legacy”. And it was about to burn the city down. Maybe that’s what she wanted.

I wondered who told him all this. What files he’d stolen, what lies he’d told, to get it. To redeem his father, if only in his heart. To give his mother some posthumous peace.

No wonder he’d been leery of telling anyone. Studiously avoided the actual press. The truth wouldn’t matter. Just the scandal.

He’d needed me, instead. A man he could trust. And I was the man he’d never wanted to confess to, I realized suddenly. He didn’t want to lose my esteem.

There was nothing I could say to assure him. Nothing else he could bring himself to say to me.

We were silent for the rest of the ride back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know anything about cars so I just said [Ford because those were common right?](https://www.anythingaboutcars.com/1940scars.html) It would be an older model.
> 
> Hal is [Jewish](https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/a-jewish-mother-for-a-galactic-cop/) and [that’s canon](https://meduseld.tumblr.com/post/188940904715/justhaljordanthings-justhaljordanthings).


	10. Chapter 10

The first explosion rocked the city at 11:15 pm. It left the streets covered in brick dust and water from a busted hydrant and took out an empty florist’s shop and a police officer, Ronald Probson.

I couldn’t save him, but I got his partner and Fries, who had set it off. He didn’t seem to mind, calmly following me away.

We had prepped, as best we could, Bruce and me, alerting hospitals and the authorities, praying they’d listen. He’d called his employees, desperate to keep them safe. They were his men now.

Then we’d waited for Fleck to unleash hell.

I’d been struggling with a beautiful redhead that was trying to burn an oil tanker docked in the harbor when Fries set off the first bomb.

Thirty minutes later, another went off and the whole city stank of panic. I’d called to warn Doc’s not to open, but he hadn’t listened.

When I’d swung by, Doc himself and Myrtle were herding people inside. I made sure the cops knew to look out for them.

A few blocks north of them, Quinzel was throwing around grenades like they were confetti. I caught one in the chest, bending over to keep in the shrapnel. My cheap shirt shredded, falling off of me in strips. I felt like Tarzan.

“Hey hot stuff!” Quinzel yelled at me, pulling out a Tommy gun. She held it like someone who knew how to use it.

“Let’s talk about this” I said, remembering the way Bill Kane had said her name. The way she’d saved his life. Even with all the things I’d seen in her files, that was still true.

“Nah, handsome, I’ve had enough talking” she said, and opened fire.

The tricky part was keeping up with the spray as they bounced off me. I’d seen a ricochet sever a man’s artery once. It hadn’t been pretty. And in the cacophony, I couldn’t tell if there were any at risk civilians nearby.

I was so focused on containing her fire that I didn’t manage to remember to drop when she ran out of bullets.

Her eyes widened, dark in her pale face, and she swore, ducking behind a silver car. Hers, from the smell of munitions and the faintest hint of Bill Kane’s blood.

I hope he was alright at the hospital, praying endless strings of rosaries with his sister. St. Swithin’s would be full to bursting tonight, if it didn’t explode entirely.

It gave me an idea. I focused my eyes on the engine. It grow hot fast, radiating through the metal, until I heard Quinzel yelp and pull away.

Just in time, too. The car went up like a firework. The third explosion of the night.

Despite being slammed into the ground by the shockwave, Quinzel struggled against me when I picked her up, bashing a knife against me until it broke. I dumped her at a station house, ranting about the monster that had come from the shadows to get her.

I had enough time after to rush home and pull on a blue and red flannel shirt before the fire in the Narrows got too high. The cheap buildings went up like kindling. Even tonight there were gamblers in the dens, gin soaked and flammable. I had to drop more than one in the water, dunking them like cookies in milk, and leaving them sputtering on the shore.

My muscles felt alive in a way they hadn’t for years, my senses alight with the chaos. I was grim and gleeful all at once. I was _useful_ , in a way only I could be. Days like this were days I didn’t mind not being human. Or nights, rather, as more bullets lit up the dark.

They came from looters and opportunists now, those who were always waiting for the opening to lash out in violence. I knew the type.

I hoped Bruce was alright. He’d practically been running a battalion from one of the studies in the Manor. Almost jokingly, he’d reminded me that he wasn’t bullet proof. Neither were the kids living like rats amongst the warehouses.

A shout had pulled me there like fillings to a magnet. “Tim, run!” said the voice, too familiar. The boy who’d helped me, for a small fee. It felt like a lifetime ago. It felt like this morning.

I moved as fast as I could. It was a worse area than before, not the relatively well-lit and kept warehouse where Bill was stabbed.

The smaller boy, Tim, hadn’t run any further than the other end of the dark, scummy alley, paralyzed by the dual urge to escape and to help his friend. I could hear what he was thinking: _I’m too small, too skinny_. Under his breath he kept mouthing _Jason, get up_ like a prayer.

The name of the boy pinned down at the other end of the alley, by someone huge and drunk and heavy.

I didn’t hesitate and neither did Jason. The moment I knocked the man off him, he got up and bolted, grabbing Tim by the elbow and pulling him away. They vanished into the thready dark of the night.

There was a sick satisfaction to the way the man’s bones crunched when he slammed a fist into my face. He was dressed like he had money, and smelled like he’d drunk it down.

It was one thing if they were Fleck’s men, or Cobblepot’s. But this was just someone taking advantage of the chaos and the lawlessness to hurt a kid that couldn’t fight back.

“You- you dunno...you dunno who you’re messing with” the man hissed, curled around his broken fist in the garbage and grime. “Guess not” I said, reaching out to bend back his arm. Not enough to break it. Just to make it clear I could.

The man made a small sound and the stench in the alley doubled. In the end I let him go. There were dozens of cries for help in my ears and the cops were too busy to care about arresting him, never mind whose take they were on.

Fleck had unleashed unnegotiable chaos. Everyone was united in just wanting to survive the night. For a moment, I wondered how many people would make it to St. Swithin’s but not any further.

As I rose up into the night, I heard the boys, huddled in the heart of an ancient building lined with lead pipes. They were alright.

Unlike the store owner twenty-two blocks down, facing looters. The city was alive tonight, in the worst way possible. I did what I could, moment to moment, place to place.

Until I heard it, far away, over everything else, far away, like a special frequency I didn’t know my senses were attuned to.

It was Bruce’s voice, calmly saying, crisply polite, “please Arthur. Let’s talk about this”. As an afterthought, my fingers finished the job at hand on their own and my feet sped away.

I don’t think I’ve ever moved that fast or will again, the world blurring into a slurry of red brick and gold flame, my head screaming at me that I would be too slow.

I didn’t even think about where I was going, my body knew the way. The Manor was empty, practically abandoned.

Bruce had returned from the war but its days of pre-conflict luxury and high society parties hadn’t. He’d kept it almost like a mausoleum, only the bare minimum of necessary staff. And Alfred of course.

Today he had dispatched all his resources to help all his employees home so they would be safe, leaving himself vulnerable. There was only one light on in the whole cavernous building. It pulled me forward, drawing me like moth to flame.

If they were still speaking, I couldn’t hear it over the roar in my ears. I could imagine it, anyway. Fleck’s frothing, self-righteous madness masquerading as the cold hard truth. Bruce’s false, icy calm, perfected by the years of living with bombs and bullets over head as he tried to get out of it alive. Before, though, he had had us to live for. What did he have now?

I felt like I was moving through molasses when I finally made it inside the small study Bruce had been using as HQ, the door left open. It was stupid, the little things my mind noticed.

The fact that the strange, sharp putrid smell that was just now reaching my nostrils, something like rotting oranges, cat urine and bleach, was coming from Fleck. The garish, too bright colors of his mismatched suit, like it had been stolen off of three different men. The glint of light off the barrel of his Tommy gun.

The sheen of the lock that had come undone from Bruce’s immaculately combed hairstyle, glowing black and white on his lined forehead. How solid he looked in his well-worn in his shadow gray sweater. The way I could smell Alfred’s careful care on it, folding it with his own hands.

The half-drunk cup of Earl Grey tea on the desk, long since gone cold, served by the same butler before heading off to a hospital where he would do the most good at his master’s insistence.

The look on Bruce’s face: calm and resigned. He had never been more handsome. It made me want to weep.

It all passed by in a perfect frozen moment that turned into a blur as I crossed the room and the gun went off.

I smelled the fiery blast of gunpowder and the gun oil sizzling on the hot metal, heard the bullets flash and strike home, tasted the tang of iron.

Bruce was in my arms and we were on the floor. He was so near, so real, it shut off all my senses from the overload. For a moment, all I could do was breathe.

Then I leveraged myself off him, just enough so I could look at his face.

“You’re alive” I marveled, taking in every blink, ever flex and flux under his skin.

“Yeah” he sounded surprised too “And you’re heavy”, he said, close to a laugh.

It made me mad enough to stick my tongue in his open mouth, as far as it would go, reveling in how he was there and living. I wanted to push it down further, all the way into his chest and onto his heart, lick at the miracle of its movement.

My hands roamed under his shirt, over his strong scarred back, to make sure he wasn’t wounded. He flooded my senses, kissing me like he’d been starving for it. I know I should feel guilty for it, luxuriating on his plushy carpeted floor like we had all the time in the world, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

It might be the last time, and I refused to lose even a second of it. We would never be here again.

After what felt like a century and not even close to long enough, he pushed me away. I moved back easily enough, trying to commit the feeling of his teeth dragging on my lips as I did to memory.

The world flooded back. I saw it rise up in his face.

Silently, I nodded at him, organizing ourselves so he would walk behind me. He wasn’t bullet proof.

For once he listened, moving panther quiet. On his way, he grabbed his handgun, from where it had been thrown into the corner.

I had questions but I swallowed them down. They didn’t matter now. I wondered if they ever would.

Especially with what had happened tonight, both in and out of the little study.

I was wrong of course.

When we made it out to the landing, the only signs of Fleck were the torn away carpet runner, gripped as he tumbled down the stairs, and the puddle of blood at the bottom of the steps. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Ronald Probson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_City_Police_Department#Former_members) really was GCPD and killed by The Joker.
> 
> Yes, that’s [Poison Ivy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_Ivy_\(character\)).
> 
> [Tarzan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan) is another period appropriate reference, and lbr, everyone wants to see him shirtless.
> 
> [Tommy guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_submachine_gun) are also pretty accurate, to my researching surprise.
> 
> And I wasn’t gonna hurt [Tim Drake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Drake), I’m not a monster.


	11. Chapter 11

There wasn’t any mention of the events at Wayne Manor in the papers the next day, of course, or the one after.

Not that there was anyone to talk, but I liked to check. I didn’t get to them until about day four, but they’d been popular enough, and people busy enough, that the kiosk was still selling them.

They were, like most of Gotham’s media, happy to share the more sensationalist details of that night, plenty of them exaggerated or outright fake.

It was what people wanted, to tell themselves it could have been worse, that they were lucky, that that night was more like a bad dream that happened to someone else. No one wanted to think about how most of the wealthiest sections of the city had been amongst the least damaged.

They wanted a new start. Especially after the rain finally broke on the second night, washing it all away. It was what we all needed, the final break in the heat.

Of course, all of them were also glad to bemoan the cost of the damage, which was the only time they brought up Bruce Wayne, wondering if he would finally step in to try and be mayor or hopefully open his checkbook.

They all ignored the fact that he’d done the second already, as soon as he was sure he could get most of the amount to the actual victims and affected neighborhood without overly lining corrupt pockets. It was Gotham, after all.

He and I hadn’t spoken since that night, either, but I’d checked up on it. I knew that’s what he wanted me to do, because it’s who I was.

Some of the aid had even reached the boys living near the warehouse. I’d made sure of it.

Besides that, they were more focused on printing what sold: reports of the mysterious hero or maybe heroes that had been seen in what seemed like several parts of the city at once.

I felt like I walked around with a red face for a week, even though I didn’t look like any of the sketches, which showed something more humanoid than human. You could argue that that’s what I was, but I really didn’t look it. And it’s not like anyone in the city even knew me enough to even think of it. Only Bruce, and he already knew.

Still, it was a relief that those articles were quickly overshadowed by stories about the Akham escapees that were still unaccounted for, especially the ones dedicated to Waylon Jones, who people said now lived in the sewers and ate stray pets and winos. A new urban legend, only one based in fact. Someone had leaked his file and he seemed the type to do something like it. Or at least something that could be exaggerated to that degree.

Enough that I did try to check out, I admit, but there was too much lead in the ground to follow the labyrinthine pipes to any sort of conclusion. It made me oddly glad to be away from print, then, the things you sometimes got stuck reporting on.

And then all of that was swept away by the anonymous tip that revealed that several of the criminals that had lit the city on fire for fun were also the landholders of territories locked in a dispute for the route for a possible train and the resulting legal snarl was so complex that it turned the transit system back into a pipe dream and a reason to bitch.

Cobblepot took enough of a hit that night to let it go. Besides, being the man responsible for the whole mess made him wanted enough, by parties both on the side of the law and not, to leave town for a while.

Not that it mattered, plenty were eager to step in where he’d been. That was Gotham for you.

I let it go too, busy with a sudden deluge of cases, plenty of which I suspected were referred to me by Bruce Wayne. It was the sort of things you’d expect after that night: finding missing persons and property, for the most part.

At least one husband was found sleeping off a bender of debauchery in a brothel, cheerfully oblivious to the mayhem that had wracked the city. I’d referred her to a divorce lawyer and helped out with some babysitting.

I knew it was a little worrying that I had fallen in love with the city after seeing the ugliest side of her face, but it wasn’t surprising, it’s the way I am and always have been. I like honesty.

At least my mother had pretended to understand, the last time we spoke. Hesitant, over a crackling telephone line, having to talk in euphemisms just in case. Like we always did. In the end, I apologized for not being able to visit yet, my workload was too heavy and I still needed to do some settling in, but I promised I would soon.

Like I did every time, but this time I meant it. It was past time. And after all this, I was past being afraid of seeing Lex Luthor’s eyes in Conner’s face.

I had a stack of books for him, _Huck Finn_ and _Sherlock Holmes_ and plenty more. Not the _Odyssey_ though. Not yet. No war stories either.

He might be too small to read them by himself right now but that was alright. He had my father, like I’d had at his age.

I also had Myrtle, who kept adding free things to my meals these days despite my insistence that she shouldn’t. I think she might have gotten a good glimpse at me that night, but there weren’t any headlines blaring my name. Yet, anyway.

Still, I had started to make contacts in the Gazette, mostly in the elevator. Putting faces to the voices that made the crosswords. Those things always came in handy.

I had other things too. A list of names to check up on, both naughty and nice, a mental map of places that deserved more patrols than the cops ever gave them.

I had a home now, and the responsibility that came with it. It felt good, a familiar weight. I’d even put up a painting in my shoebox apartment. The first personal touch. Payment from a client with no other means. I liked it, an icy landscape with a frozen palace under a steely blue sky.

I was balancing a few books I was taking from my office book case to replace with some more professional ones, leveraging them onto my cheek, when I felt more than heard my office door open. It was one of the things I liked about the end of the heat wave, it had shrunk back into the frame.

“I’ll be right with you, just give me a second” I saying, trying to breathe through the wave of dust and mice shit I’d kicked up.

“Oh, I’ll give _you_ a whole minute” drawled Bruce Wayne, leaning in the door frame like he belonged there.

I fumbled the books of course, but only for a moment. I wasn’t naive enough to think he hadn’t noticed, but he had the decency not to mention it.

“I’m here about a payment problem” he said as I stayed silent, overly focused on straightening the books still on the shelf. I didn’t know what to say. Where to start.

“A lawyer might be more helpful” I said at last, feeling his eyes on my back. “I’ve got plenty on payroll, sure, but I don’t think they can do much, given that the problem is that you’ve refused to let me pay you” he said, still sounding mostly amused.

I finally looked vaguely in his direction. He looked good. Even better than he did sprawled out under me on his expensive carpet, and that was saying something. He looked like he was actually getting some sleep these days. And he was more comfortable out of the heat.

“I thought you might need it for your mayoral campaign” I said, pretending my desk had suddenly become absolutely fascinating.

It actually sounded like a nightmare, being surrounded by his smiling posters, not to mention four years of constant news coverage on him, banal interviews and glamour shots. Another lucky thing about quitting reporting; at least I wouldn’t be the one that had to do it.

“Oh, I’m not running” he said, studiedly casual, like he wasn’t dropping one hell of a scoop. Not that I would use it. Old habits, you know.

“That’s going to break some hearts” I said at last. He was the best choice, I had to admit, not that Gothamites were spoiled for one. He was honest, despite being one hell of a liar. I didn’t say that, either.

“Guess I’ll collect then” I managed to joke, and he smiled. Exactly like I was hoping for. Despite everything, it was what I wanted.

“I’ll do you one better. Double, in exchange for another little job” he said, still smiling. I wasn’t. Those were dangerous waters, especially knowing what I knew now. My answer should be no.

Instead I said “the last job wasn’t so little”. “Triple then. And I think you’ll like it”. If you didn’t know him, you might miss the razor’s edge hiding under the blithe confidence.

“Does it involve our old friend?” I said, not quite reaching for my coat. “It might. Depends on who you mean” he said and I was in trouble. He knew it, too. I sighed.

“Tell me about it over lunch” and his smile turned bright until I added “as long as you’re buying”.

He put a hand over his heart, like he was wounded. An uncomfortable shiver passed along my spine. The shot at the Manor was still too close for comfort. And the shooter still out there.

“You drive a hard bargain, Kent, but you have a deal” he said and held the door open for me like a real gentleman.

I shook my head, mostly to hide that I was fighting back a smile of my own. I’d missed him, no matter how much I didn’t want to admit it.

I walked out and he followed me, the door clicking shut behind us.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, that’s [Killer Croc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Croc). Y también una referencia a [_Esto huele mal_](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esto_huele_mal), para los colombianos. And the [Fortress of Solitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_of_Solitude). If you made it this far, thank you, [good night, and good luck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Night,_and_Good_Luck).

**Author's Note:**

> I’d like to take a second to shout out my big noir-and-not inspirations here: [Out of the Past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Past), [Chinatown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_\(1974_film\)), [The Maltese Falcon, ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_\(1941_film\))[L.A. Confidential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Confidential_\(film\)) and [True Detective](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_\(season_2\)). Like most noir, this is set vaguely post war in the fifties ish like [DC: The New Frontier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC:_The_New_Frontier). As always, V, you're my rock.


End file.
